Solicitor General Paul D. Clement will resign from the Justice Department in early June, the department announced yesterday.
Gun activists were upset with him earlier this year because of a brief he filed in the Second Amendment challenge of the District’s handgun ban.
Clement agreed with their position that the amendment affords an individual right to gun ownership, but said the lower-court ruling that struck the D.C. law was so broadly rendered that it endangered all federal gun control legislation. He urged the court to return the case for further review; it has not yet ruled.
Clement, 41, has argued 49 cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government.
A former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, Clement has been a member of the Federalist Society and is well-known as a legal conservative, but he has also been praised by liberal justices on the Supreme Court.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/14/AR2008051403697.html
